Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Bias up front: I work at Google. I obviously don't speak for the company here.

We are definitely hearing a lot about this stuff from Google and other tech companies lately. I don't know what we can reliably infer from the absence of that kind of news what that says about other industries.

My intuition is that workplace sexual harassment has been rife in all aspects of human endeavor since the dawn of time. The "boss screwing the secretary" trope isn't exactly a new one. It may be that we're seeing a combination of things:

1. Thanks to the #metoo movement, people who get harassed now have enough power to actually be able to stand up and cause the person they accuse to face some scrutiny. Before, it was just swept under the rug. "Boys will be boys", "that's what you get for dressing like that", "you should have known better to stay late at work with him", etc.

2. The very rapid rise of tech as a cultural dominator makes them a prime actor in our moral narratives. The average person sees a handful of giant tech companies dramatically changing the way we all live, and they naturally want to know if they are a force for good or evil. Those kinds of journalistic narratives sell.

For all we know, sexual harassment could be 10x worse in the insurance industry but we won't know because who wants to read articles about the insurance industry?

3. There's also the obvious bias that if something happens too much, it ceases to be news. "Newsworthiness" is a combination of significance and novelty. The former is where good investigative journalism can show the scope of a sweeping hidden problem. The latter is the old "dog bites man" isn't news but "man bites dog" is. It's easy to mistake the latter for the former and assume that something being reported indicates a trend, when really it indicates the exact opposite.

So, it may be that things really are worse at Google than at other places, but I don't know if we can rely on the presence of news articles to judge that.

These are all good points. Certainly, there are tons of examples of sexual harassment in other industries. I'll submit, however, that tech is a bit outside the mainstream on this. While sexual harassment happens for example at law firms, nobody in the legal profession (and I suspect, most of "sanitized corporate America") would try to defend with a straight face the practice of relationships between supervisors and underlings, as is typical here on HN.

In the legal profession which is prestige driven, relationship based, artificially supply constrained and very lucrative, you would fear for your career over most else especially if you're lower on the totem pole.

This creates a perverse set of incentives to hide all misbehavior even if you're a victim of it.

So I don't know where you're getting this idea that lawyers would automatically defend themselves in those kinds of situations when the incentives are heavily weighted towards ignoring the situations and moving on.

As a software engineer in the tech industry though (especially at a place like Google), you can tell your employer to fuck off and you can find a new high-paying job tomorrow.

I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying that "lawyers would automatically defend themselves" if they were harassed. Harassment gets buried in the legal profession for the same reasons it gets buried everywhere.

My point is that the Overton window is in a different place: whether it's okay for supervisors to date underlings, with all the problems that causes, is a settled debate in law as well as most of the rest of corporate America (it's not). Tech seems out of the mainstream to me in still entertaining the idea that it's okay.

Thanks for the clarification, because that's not what I got from your original comment.

I actually didn't consider it from that perspective e.g. it's a settled debate in other professions but a seemingly recurring debate in tech. That's an interesting point you raise and I think it's a valid one.

> As a software engineer in the tech industry though (especially at a place like Google), you can tell your employer to fuck off and you can find a new high-paying job tomorrow.

A white or asian man can do that, sure. But that's not necessarily true for women and other marginalized groups in the tech industry. Especially if this means they won't get a reference from their current employer.

Many tech companies that I know actually huge preference to "marginalized" group. I don't know if it is still done but Microsoft used to have a reputation that they would call females in for a second interview as long as the first wasn't terrible.

It's rather dehumanizing to refer to woman as "females". Please don't do that.

Sorry, not my first language

You have a valid point, but I think the "especially at a place like Google" part is relevant in my comment.

If you're a software engineer, woman, and at Google, you'll obviously still face challenges but getting hired is less likely to be one of them. That's a powerful wind in a person's back when standing up to a company - especially when others are willing to band together with you (because the others can easily find new jobs too). It's a compounding effect.

I presume the dynamic is far different in law or investment banking even if you're highly skilled in the respective industry.

> While sexual harassment happens for example at law firms, nobody in the legal profession (and I suspect, most of "sanitized corporate America") would try to defend with a straight face the practice of relationships between supervisors and underlings, as is typical here on HN.

I think you would be terribly surprised.

Most of the people sitting in politics come from the legal profession.

You don't magically start harassing people simply because you get elected. The fact that you harass people is already well established before that.

Not that I understand the point you're making, but, whatever it is, the people "sitting in politics" are a tiny minority of the legal profession as a whole.

To be clear I’m not saying sexual harassment is less common in law than in tech. I’m just saying that people are at least publicly on board with certain policies and best practices.

> "dog bites man" isn't news but "man bites dog" is.

That would imply that "jocks have sex" isn't news but "nerds have sex" is. Heh.

But there were also news about jocks having sex... so perhaps the rule governing the sexual harassment coverage in news is instead: "sex sells".

Writing stories about sexual harassment, especially colorful stories with lots of details, is simply a way to write about sex (and for the readers to read about sex) with plausible deniability. "No, I am NOT writing/reading these juicy stories as a form of porn; how dare you suggest that?! We are fighters against patriarchy, and we need to know every technical detail about how this agent of patriarchy misbehaved."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com